Emily Isakson is a junior at Mount Holyoke College and was a Readers’ Services page this past summer. As an ancient studies major, with a focus in art history and archaeology, Emily has always been interested in what has shaped the society we know today. Her time at AAS only furthered her curiosity of the ...
Fraud Week on Past is Present concludes today on an appropriately ambiguous note with examples from AAS's graphic arts collections, most of which are not true forgeries but rather what might be called wishful attributions. These works of art hover perpetually in "the limbo of doubtful pictures," to quote an earlier AAS librarian. ...
If we’re to believe iconic popular culture films like Christian Slater’s 1990 Pump Up the Volume, media and information pirates act as heroic rebels fighting an overbearing FCC and even more overbearing parents. If we’re to believe historians like Adrian Johns, author of the recently published Piracy and Death of a Pirate, piracy has fostered ...
Deborah M. Child (www.deborahmchild.com) has been at AAS for the past month researching her upcoming book on Lyman Parks (1788-1872). Parks’ forged bank notes were so accomplished that even the experts could not tell his notes from legitimate currency. Part of Fraud Week on Past is Present, Deborah's post below gives ...
We are kicking off Fraud Week on Past is Present with a big one: forgeries of George Washington's handwriting. The choice of subject is particularly apropos since today is Washington's birthday and, not surprisingly, the American Antiquarian Society has many Washington-related items, including: over 2,600 books, pamphlets, periodicals, and graphics related to George Washington listed in ...
Discovery Channel may have cornered the market on Shark Week, but here at Past is Present we are instituting our own Fraud Week to explore the seamier underside of the archive. Or perhaps we will discover that there is another side to fakes, forgeries, and frauds, in a similar manner to how Shark Week ...
